By Shankar Lakshmanan, GIS Software Developer

The Snow*Mobile conference was held earlier this year in Madison, Wis. There were interesting presentations on how various web and mobile technologies are helping and empowering people. Here are outlines of a few talks that stood out to me as interesting and informative.

By Kelly Fisher, Senior Development Manager

If you have an interest in GIS, gardening, and sustaining the environment, then permaculture may be for you. Permaculture is designing a self-sufficient environment for a network of people, from a community or city down to a single family. The practice of permaculture results in using natural resources in a sustainable way to produce a surplus and not introducing anything that will negatively impact/harm the environment, such as pesticides, invasive/non-native plants, etc.

According to author Toby Hemenway of Gaia’s Garden, the five main steps in designing an ecological garden is to observe, visualize, plan, develop, and then implement. GIS can be used as a helpful tool in completing these steps, particularly the first three.  

By: Jonathan Pollack, Senior Vice President

I recently returned from GIS-T in Boise, Idaho. In addition to a great conference, I discovered that Boise is a wonderful city. The conference was very well attended with representation from more than 40 states. I find this conference refreshing, as nearly all attendees are focused on learning from each other, sharing their ideas and, solving the mutual challenges they face in the transportation arena. The GIS-T staff did a great job this year and having the ASIS conference run concurrently was an added bonus; these are exciting times in the GIS-T space.